Final Fight's Official Clone

It's been a long time since I wanted to make a Burning Fight review, to say the least! We travel back in time to 1991. At this time, the Neo Geo has only Sengoku and Ninja Combat as Beat Them Up. Burning Fight then hits the market, and it sounds a little like SNK's answer to Capcom's Final Fight, released two years earlier on the CPS. If this 89' title marked the genre by its quality and gameplay innovations, what about Burning Fight...? Three selectable characters, five different stages, numerous weapons and objects to destroy... all this sounds pretty good. Well, after having finished Burning Fight, my feelings are mixed. The game features some very good ideas, but also some unforgivable flaws. At first glance, we can say the soft is graphically very nice, at a level close to Capcom's production (which was a true benchmark) with a wide variety of environments, beautiful colors and inspired drawings.

On this point, Burning Fight is far from disappointing, even if it's not perfect. The music is subtle (yet not memorable, but it's usually the case in a BTU) and the sound effects are excellent quality. We are granted some very good vocals, and the impacts of blows offer good sensations. What's wrong then? The game fails on a few important points, at least pretty important for a Beat them Up. The animation, if it's fast enough, lacks fluidity and flexibility: the characters are a bit steep, while more decomposition and smoothness would have been great. Other detail, Burning Fight lacks precision concerning sprites collisions: it feels like sloppy work. This is amazing especially coming from SNK, who had accustomed its followers to great realizations. The backgrounds, on the other hand, are well animated, zooms on sprites are perfectly using the system's capabilities, and differential scrollings are really nice. The other downside of the soft is its gameplay, and incidentally the replay value. Indeed, the five missions can be cleared within forty minutes. It's quite passable here, as the genre is often subject to this feature.

Consequently of what we stated above, the gameplay has a few flaws. We must deal with the stiffness of characters and the lack of precision of impacts, particularly with jumping attacks. On the other hand, the enemy blows are imprecise and sometimes hit you when you weren't expecting it! Furthermore, if protagonists have only one throw (poorly animated, it seems that the enemy slips through your fingers) the rest of the range of blows is nice with kicks (C) or punches (A), jumps, (B), combinations, materials to destroy in the stages and weapons to collect. The special move, activated with A+B, devastates everything around you, but removes a bit life. Burning Fight does almost good on this chapter, with a array of moves quite similar to what was proposed in Final Fight.  It only lacks one more throw per character, that's all. Speaking about A.I, the enemies are pretty annoying, with some of them always repeating the same attacks and invariably hitting you, often leaving you no time to get up, and taking away your life without you could even defend yourself: frustrating!

For example, the dudes armed with chains (who will seek you all along the game) have an aerial attack that have priority over ninety percent of your attacks. So, let me wish you good luck with these dudes, especially when they attack two or three together, it's a hard beat. I don't think programmers wanted this to happen, as those characters are in a way more tricky than certain Bosses. About the variety of enemies, the game offers a decent bestiary, with about fifteen different opponents, plus the different Bosses and other "extras". Despite some good ideas like the inside of the stores to destroy, a good variety of weapons to pick up, destructible elements as street furnitures, bicycles and other vehicles to smash happily, there is still a little something missing. Even if we have a really good time playing, one can not help but blame SNK for not having more tweaked its game, which could have been excellent, even better than Final Fight. Finally, Burning Fight stood in arcades as a good Beat them Up, while considering the system and developer involved, one would have expected a motherfucking fighting game.